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March 31, 2016

You don’t know how tempted I was to make a
reference to God Hand for this
subtitle. But since this title’s more fitting,
I might as well do it now.

You know what, though? I remember once on this blog, someone was
under the impression that I don’t like God
Hand. That’s seriously not the case. It’s
not my favorite game ever -- and it’s not what I’d call a technical marvel --
but I like the combat, I like the customization, and I like the difficulty
level (which changes depending on how well/poorly you do throughout the
stages). But what really sets the game
apart from others is its sense of humor and spirit. It’s wacky and wild, and very few games have
captured that magic since. Very few
games have tried.

I’ve gone about this at length, but it bears
repeating: by and large, the AAA game space has done its best to do away with
(intentional) humor and charm. So many
titles are trying to be BIG and EPIC and SERIOUS and DEEP, yet so many of them
have collapsed under their own hubris.
How did Capcom, the company that made the unapologetically-goofy Resident Evil 4 (and God Hand, of course) go on to make the
embarrassingly-po-faced Resident Evil 6?

So in a lot of ways, I’ve built up a tolerance for
products that adopt a
“no jokes policy”. It’s no surprise,
then, that Batman v. Superman: Dawn of
Justice doesn’t leave much of an impression -- but trust me, the lack of
humor is the LEAST of this movie’s problems.

March 24, 2016

He’s been one of the big players in the DC Comics
universe for a while now. And not to
generalize, but I’d assume that Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Bat-movies
secured his place in the public consciousness.
From what I've heard, it’s reached a point where the Dark Knight has
become the superhero of the DC
Universe, movies or otherwise -- even taking the top honors from Superman. When it was still running, the Penny Arcade
Report mentioned that a catalogue of what should’ve been Superman’s greatest
moments instead focused on listing his myriad failures throughout the years --
as if to break down and even shame a national (if fictional) embodiment of
truth, justice, and the American way.

With Batman
vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice on the way, it’ll be interesting to see how
the crew behind it handles the DC heroes.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m very nervous, and even worried; even
at a base level, it’ll take a deft hand to balance so many elements -- two
superheroes well among them. And there’s
so much more spiraling around the movie: a rebooted, post-Nolan Batman, dealing
with the ramifications of and backlash toward Man of Steel, establishing a cinematic universe in a fraction of
the time Marvel did, et cetera, et cetera.
Done poorly, it’d be the perfect way to make people hate Batman,
Superman, and DC in general -- if they didn’t already. (Let’s
just pretend Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t exist for now.)

But that’s the real issue here. What do you do when there’s evidence -- more
than enough reason -- to hate someone like Batman? Or Superman?
Or DC? Or anything, really? I sure hope the answer isn’t “lose your damn
mind”.

March 21, 2016

I don’t want to risk slotting into the hole of “the
Final Fantasy guy”, because that’s a
hard hole to escape from. Also, I’m
seriously not equipped for it; I haven’t even played half of the main games in
the franchise, after all. Even then, you
could still argue that I haven’t played that many -- depending on how you feel
about some of the modern installments, i.e. entries in the so-called Lightning
Saga and Final Fantasy Type-0. Still, a franchise as famous as Final Fantasy can bore a squishy nook
into any gamer’s brain. As parasitic
worms would. Probably.

In any case, my backlog reaches into the heavens,
and one of those games happens to be Final
Fantasy 10. Granted I’d already
finished it at least once before, but I thought I’d have a look at it to see
how it held up. That’s becoming an
increasingly-lower priority, since the Best Friends Zaibatsu started an LP of
the game; naturally, I’ve been following it as closely as I can. They’re playing through it so I don’t have
to. And as a result, I’ve come to a
shocking conclusion.

I think I like Tidus. I think I like Tidus now more than I ever did
-- and he’s at risk of becoming my favorite Final
Fantasy lead.

March 17, 2016

I hope that title doesn’t imply that Ubisoft is a
developer/publisher solely capable of evil -- as if we can only count on it for
acts of avarice, trickery, and the closest thing to evil a company could ever
know. It can do a lot more than that,
right?

Right?

Uh…right?

Well, let’s go ahead and move on, and not think about that implication any
longer than we have to.

March 14, 2016

I hope you can appreciate the sheer audacity of someone who can lose to a
basic throw applied ad nauseam has deciding that he’s got the credibility to
put together a character guide. My
chutzpah strokes the heavens themselves.

So yeah, I’m by no means an authority on the
subject of Street Fighter V, or
fighting games in general. But I’ve
played (and lost in) just enough of them to have a grasp of certain
concepts. By extension, I’ve been able
to glean a thing or two in my time with SFV. And seeing as how I had more than enough
content for a full post, I figured I should share. You know, just in case anyone wanted to
compare notes.

By no means is this a complete list, but I’m sure
you can already guess the meaning behind them.
Indeed, this is a backlog of games that I want to play -- and hopefully
write about at some point. Moreover,
it’s a list of games that are readily available to me; they were within a few
steps of me every time I sat down to play Uncharted
3: Drake’s Deception. But I refused
to play them until I cleared every last game in The Nathan Drake Collection.

And every time I sat down to play Drake’s Deception, I was reminded just
how dearly, how desperately I wanted
to bail and play something else.

March 7, 2016

So in the last post, it
sounded like I was pretty hard on Street
Fighter V-- and I hate that
it had to come out that way. I wanted to
sing about the game’s praises from dawn till dusk for the next eight
months. But with so many complaints and
controversies spiraling around the game -- with more than enough justification
-- it’s not like I can bury my head in the sand. People that are angry have a right to be angry. Those who are shaking their heads at Capcom
have the grounds to do so. The SFV launch is appreciable for releasing
sooner rather than later, but it did so in a less-than-ideal state.

At least, that’s what it says on paper. But the devs dumped a lot of time and effort
into the actual game, and it shows. I’m
not going to say this is the best SF ever,
because I’m way out of my depth on that one.
But this is still an amazing SF game,
if you ask me. It’s certainly my
favorite Capcom fighter in recent years, since it’s got a lot going for
it. Chief among them, the music. Survival Mode’s taken some heat, but
everything was forgiven when I first heard the Congratulations jingle.

IT’S SO GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD. But anyway, let’s talk about the actual game.